Elden Ring is a huge open world.
From the start you can kind of go where it points you. It will try to teach you without words “you don’t have to fight everything you see.” You can just go around things.
There’s like 3 or 4 little side areas right near the start. The map kind of points you north to a big castle, but you can fuck off to the southern area if you want. Or go to the horrible wasteland. Or figure out how to skip the whole castle and go to the big lake area. Or skip that, too, and go to the nice autumn area. Lots of choices. Not linear.
Okay awesome. Thanks, I think I’m going to try it.
I definitely hated the controls and confining movement of dark souls 1 when I tried it, but maybe I’ll enjoy the more rapid response of a modern open world type thing.
Sounds like I was just being a negative Nancy!
I hope you like it. The controls are a refinement of ds1, but they’re basically the same joysticks for movement + camera, shoulder buttons for hands.
Some last advice from me:
- you don’t have to kill everything. You can often just walk away or run past.
- you can almost always leave and come back later after leveling up, improving your equipment, or just clearing your head.
- read item descriptions
- pay attention to the UI. When you look at a weapon, it will tell you what stats you need for it and what stats increase its damage.
- read the help text for the UI. I think you push select and move the cursor around to get the explainers.
- HP is the most important thing. Don’t neglect it when leveling up. Stamina is also important. There are a lot of videos online of people getting one shot by bosses because they have like the minimum possible HP. Don’t do that.
- dying doesn’t really matter. It feels bad, but you get used to it.
Someone else mentioned that the inventory load effects the roll speed, so maybe I went wrong there also.
Thanks for the tips, I’ll definitely put them into play.
